Mark Woods: We shouldn't ignore this 50th anniversary

Tuesday

Jun 5, 2018 at 4:53 PMJun 5, 2018 at 10:37 PM

Rick Mullaney speaks all over the country, telling the story of how Jacksonville ended up with a consolidated city-county government in 1968.

Mullaney explains that the door actually opened in 1934 with an amendment to the Florida constitution. But for decades, nobody chose to use it. Consolidation votes failed everywhere from Gainesville to Tampa.

“My joke when I present this is that … 34 years later we were blessed with this horrible crisis,” he said.

Sewage in the river, schools losing accreditation, racial tension and — one of the main issues that led voters to say it was time for a dramatic change — the indictments of public officials.

Thank goodness that doesn’t happen anymore, right?

Mullaney told this story last week when he came to the Times-Union as part of a consolidation task force preparing to mark the 50th anniversary this fall. The group, an interesting mix of people and perspectives, readily acknowledged that consolidation hasn’t erased all the problems that existed in 1968.

As if on cue, a few days later came headlines that illustrated this quite well: Two Jacksonville City Council members indicted on fraud charges.

A story that began with high hopes for a local barbecue sauce eventually led to a 38-count federal indictment accusing Katrina Brown and Reggie Brown of fraudulently receiving “tens of thousands of dollars” from a U.S. Small Business Administration loan.

It’s tempting to point to this and say nothing has changed in 50 years. But considering the scope and seriousness of what helped spark consolidation — 11 officials indicted on 142 counts of bribery and larceny — I figure this qualifies as progress.

I’m joking. Sort of.

We still have a laundry list of issues with remnants of 1968. When Irma flooded our city, millions of gallons of raw sewage ended up in our waterways. We still have racial tension. We still have issues with our schools. And we still have scandals involving public officials — in recent years, a congresswoman, a police union head, a public defender, a port authority chairman and more.

You can change forms of government but you can’t change human nature.

But Jacksonville is better today than it was in 1968. Our river, our schools and, yes, maybe even our officials.

Not all of them, of course. There were some pretty good leaders in the 1960s. One of them was Earl Johnson. If consolidation hadn’t passed, he almost certainly would have become Jacksonville’s first black mayor. But he was among those who supported the new government, believing it was the best hope for the future, for African-Americans and the city as a whole.

Whether that is true still is being debated today.

Johnson’s son, Earl Johnson Jr., is one of the task force members. He remembers dinner table discussions about consolidation. And while he understands lingering misgivings in the African-American community, he believes it’s important to mark this anniversary and continue having discussions about where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

Matt Carlucci, whose father also was instrumental in consolidation, said: “A lot of our younger leaders really have no idea. They know we’re consolidated. But they’re not really sure what that means or what it took.”

Mullaney, who grew up in Jacksonville, worked for three mayors and now is the director of the Public Policy Institute at Jacksonville University, says this isn’t about a sentimental journey back to 1968. (Although as a fellow Detroit Tigers fans, I'm sure he'd welcome a return to that World Series.) He describes consolidation as “the most significant local government restructuring in the history of the state of Florida” — and says we should see the 50th as an opportunity to assess how to make the make the most of it.

The task force has had some pushback to the idea of “celebrating” the 50th anniversary. Some in town are reluctant to even acknowledge it, because that means acknowledging its unfulfilled promises.

Alan Bliss, a University of North Florida history professor and interim director of the Jacksonville Historical Society, argues that’s precisely one of the reasons we shouldn’t let the anniversary pass.

American democracy, he said, also failed to live up to some of its initial promises. But we don’t shrink from celebrating it.

“We acknowledge that it is an ongoing project to fix those failures,” he said. “And I think so it should be in Jacksonville.”

He pointed out that we often talk about Jacksonville struggling to have a coherent metropolitan identity.

Consolidation didn't just make Jacksonville the largest city by land mass in the lower 48. Consolidation is at the heart of our identity.

Where else is the rallying cry the name of the county?

mwoods@jacksonville.com,

(904) 359-4212

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